Name: Andy BechtelFrom: UNC-Chapel Hill, North Carolina, United StatesAbout me: I teach editing and writing at the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at UNC-Chapel Hill. I'm interested in new ways to tell news stories and in the ethical and political ramifications of word choices (terrorist surveillance program, domestic spying or something in between?).
I have 12 years of experience in newspaper editing, most recently at The News & Observer in Raleigh, N.C.

Paper Cuts, a New York Times blog about books, is asking readers to contribute "a favorite signature passages in books they love — a sentence or two that seem to convey the essence of a complex, beautiful work?"

Here's mine. It's from "Slaughterhouse-Five" by Kurt Vonnegut, in which the main character, Billy Pilgrim, watches a movie on television:

He came slightly unstuck in time, saw the late movie backwards, then forwards again. It was a movie about American bombers in the Second World War and the gallant men who flew them. Seen backwards by Billy, the story went like this :

American planes, full of holes and wounded men and corpses took off backwards from an airfield in England. Over France, a few German fighter planes flew at them backwards, sucked bullets and shell fragments from some of the planes and crewmen. They did the same for wrecked American bombers on the ground, and those planes flew up backwards to join the formation.

The formation flew backwards over a German city that was in flames. The bombers opened their bomb bay doors, exerted a miraculous magnetism which shrunk the fires, gathered them into cylindrical steel containers, and lifted the containers into the bellies of the planes. The containers were stored neatly in racks. The Germans below had miraculous devices of their own, which were long steel tubes. They used them to suck more fragments from the crewmen and planes. But there were still a few wounded Americans, though, and some of the bombers were in bad repair. Over France, though, German fighters came up again, made everything and everybody as good as new.

When the bombers got back to their base, the steel cylinders were taken from the racks and shipped back to the United States of America, where factories were operating night and day, dismantling the cylinders, separating the dangerous contents into minerals. Touchingly, it was mainly women who did this work. The minerals were then shipped to specialists in remote areas. It was their business to put them into the ground, to hide them cleverly, so they would never hurt anybody ever again.

The American fliers turned in their uniforms, became high school kids. And Hitler turned into a baby, Billy Pilgrim supposed. That wasn't in the movie. Billy was extrapolating. Everybody turned into a baby, and all humanity, without exception, conspired biologically to produce two perfect people named Adam and Eve, he supposed.

The passage epitomizes Vonnegut's view on war as well as his writing style, which has a journalistic tone. Like much of his work, this is absurd, hilarious and heartbreaking all at the same time.

I thought of this passage when news came last year that Vonnegut had died. So it goes. I am heartened that his writing is still with us even if the man himself is not.

I remember when I was about six or seven years old our Sunday School showed a movie about Jesus and the miracle of the fishes and the loaves. At the end when they rewound it we could see Jesus walking around backwards taking every loaf and fish back and putting it all in his basket. After that we always begged to see the movies played backwards. I wonder if K.V. had this same experience.